Optical Observations Reveal Strong Evidence for High Energy Neutrino Progenitor

TL;DR

This paper reports the first astronomical observation linking a high-energy neutrino event to a specific blazar, TXS 0506+056, demonstrating rapid variability detection shortly after neutrino detection.

Contribution

It provides the earliest optical observation of a neutrino error box with evidence of blazar activity change, establishing a direct connection between neutrinos and a specific astrophysical source.

Findings

Rapid optical variability detected within minutes of neutrino event

Blazar TXS 0506+056 was in off-state then switched to on-state within two hours

Significance level of variability detection is 50-sigma

Abstract

We present the earliest astronomical observation of a high energy neutrino error box in which its variability was discovered after high-energy neutrinos detection. The one robotic telescope of the MASTER global international network (Lipunov et al. 2010) automatically imaged the error box of the very high-energy neutrino event IceCube-170922A. Observations were carried out in minute after the IceCube-170922A neutrino event was detected by the IceCube observatory at the South Pole. MASTER found the blazar TXS 0506+056 to be in the off-state after one minute and then switched to the on-state no later than two hours after the event. The effect is observed at a 50-sigma significance level. Also we present own unique 16-years light curve of blazar TXS 0506+056 (518 data set).